Plug Payments leaks in real-time

Payment transaction monitoring is the practice of observing financial transactions and payment data (payment approval/failure, payment fees and rates, payment behavior, etc.) to ensure performance and availability by the owner of the payment operations. When monitoring payments closely it can protect revenue, help avoid unnecessary risk (chargebacks, failures, declines, financial), increase profitability and improve experience for merchants,users, acquirers and payment service providers.

In today’s digital world, real-time transactions have become the norm, allowing consumers, merchants and financial institutions to transfer money instantly, or pay instantly either in a POS or online. All real-time transactions are digital and carry a similar amount of data points to monitor closely. Real-time transactions are more in the eye of the user when in fact, merchants, payments companies and financial institutions are making huge efforts to support these operations to occur in real time. The payment authorization always happens real time, but the rest can take time; time for the merchant to monitor the payment, check for fraud and confirm, the issuer to approve the charging of the user card, etc. In most cases, those operations and processes take a few milliseconds, but when inspection is needed, the merchant wants to be on the safe side and avoid chargebacks, approving payments and completing the full payment cycle for each payment can take a few hours to days.

Most payment processors will provide you, aside from processing payments, a dashboard and a set of a few reports to monitor after payments were processed, or while monitoring pending payments. made. These reports usually include a very basic list of dimensions and details on the payment such as Initiator name, Currency, Country, etc. There are usually extremely basic reports with no insights that are based on static thresholds, tiers and expected volume.

AI and ML-driven analytics technology solutions are also available and can observe payment and transaction metrics and alert on any deviations in normal transactional behavior.

These tools allow you to connect your payments stream to their servers and monitor your payment data autonomously and without manual proactive monitoring.

Payment monitoring is used by almost all departments in the business on some scale. Whether it’s a retail store, a bank, or a gym, monitoring your payments is monitoring your incoming revenue. It is critical and crucial. Monitoring is made for accounting purposes, risk protection, acceptance rate optimization, user’s tracking, anti money laundering activity, fees breakdown and expectancy. Reports or alerts on payment incidents help the business owner track revenue and operational critical events. 

Most businesses already have dashboards, BI tools and excel sheets, but if you want to be alerted on events that happen in your business real time, and are impacting your revenue and user satisfaction – you must have basic monitoring capabilities.

All payment methods and tools (card transactions, bank transfers, deposits, settlements, charges, refunds, chargebacks, canceled payments and every payment method or status) can be closely monitored real time as long as the payments owner have access to the payment data via the processor, the bank or as a set of reports.

When searching for a payment monitoring tool it is important to take the following into consideration:

• Ability to accept, store and analyze masses of payments data
• Root cause analysis – look for a tool that will be able to tell you a story, not just a snapshot. Search for a tool that could help you understand what went wrong, where, and why. If your detection tool won’t tell you that – you’d have to manually look it up.
• AI / ML capabilities are crucial. Businesses in their nature are cyclical. Using static rule engines doesn’t give you the full picture. 
• Correlation – in order to save time and add efficiency to the work process – it is important for the person who monitors payments to understand where else, if at all, the business was impacted by an incident that was detected. Being able to correlate incidents is crucial for proper incident handling.
• Zero Noise Policy – a monitoring solution that alerts you every minute, or a few times a day, doesn’t do the job well. You need to get true alerts on impactful incidents.
• Actionable insights – find out whether your monitoring tool can provide you insights and alerts, with CTA, or at least integration to your internal systems

 Payment-related use cases include:

• Merchant monitoring – behavior, trends, routing
• User journey / registration / signup / onboarding
• Payments requests /statuses/ trends/ 
• Fraud/ Risk / Suspicious activity
• Loan/ defaults / delinquency
• Trades / Requests / fluctuations / quotes/ exposures 
• Treasury / deposits / settlements / exposures / FX